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The summer blockbuster is back! And that sound you just heard is Hollywood letting out its collective breath. After more than a year of delays, Universal’s latest entry in the money-minting Fast & Furious cycle, F9: The Fast Saga, burned rubber out of the gate with a massive $70 million domestic debut. The opening not only left all previous pandemic-era box-office records in the dust, but also marked the biggest North American bow since 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

This is the weekend Hollywood has been waiting for. F9: The Fast Saga finally opens in the U.S. after over a year of delays, and it is the first major blockbuster release of the summer. It’s been a rocky summer movie season, with one bonafide hit (A Quiet Place Part II), a string of disappointments (Peter Rabbit 2, In The Heights, Spiral), and films that came somewhere in between (The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, Cruella). It is hard to know exactly where the industry stands and how to diagnose the lackluster grosses of many films. On one hand, there is still some segment of the audience that is reluctant to go back to the movies, and VOD availability for many films could be diminishing the turnout. On the other hand, maybe many of the films released so far have just not been the right films to draw the audience back. F9 might just be the movie to change that for many, and it feels like a test for the industry, letting us know how “back to normal” we really are.

The box office has been in a strange in-between zone, no longer in the doldrums of the pandemic but not quite back to normal either. After Memorial Day weekend seemed to bring back America’s movie mania -- thanks to the openings of A Quiet Place Part II and Cruella -- things have stalled a bit since then, especially with the twin disappointments last weekend (In The Heights and Peter Rabbit 2). This weekend feels like something of a placeholder while Hollywood eagerly awaits F9, which has already brought in $292.1 million internationally, to kick off a season of blockbusters. Despite being a relatively uneventful Father’s Day weekend at the box office, the one big newcomer, The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, has held down the fort quite well.

Our road to box office recovery has had its ups and downs, and after a few weekends in a row of $20+ million openers (A Quiet Place Part II, Cruella, and The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It), it feels as if we’ve taken a step backward again as In The Heights and Peter Rabbit 2 under-performed, both opening in the low teens. Despite those soft openings, though, the overall weekend box office of $57 million was still the fourth best this year. Even if this weekend backslides below $50 million, an unthinkable number pre-pandemic, it will still be far ahead of where we were one month ago, and only one week remains until F9 hits, hopefully giving the industry the blockbuster opening it has been waiting for.

The critics swooned for it, the studio marketed the heck out of it, and its feel-good message couldn’t have arrived at a better time. So why did Warner Bros’ splashy new movie-musical In the Heights receive such a lukewarm turnout in its opening weekend? With advance predictions pegging the debut of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s stage-to-screen adaptation at around $20 million, In the Heights fell well short of expectations, pulling in a soft $11.4 million in its first frame, leaving an opening for the three-week-old horror sequel A Quiet Place Part II to reclaim the top spot in North America. Meanwhile, Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway hopped its way into third place in with a $10.4 million bow.

After four weekends of horror films topping the box office -- a highly unusual occurrence in general and even more so in the summer -- we are moving into some lighter territory with this weekend’s two new wide releases. In The Heights and Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway are both opening and hoping to pull in viewers looking for sunny, feel-good experiences as we continue to recover from the pandemic. We still have two weeks to go until we get a proper blockbuster release when F9 makes its stateside debut, but this weekend’s cheery offerings will hopefully continue to draw more moviegoers back to the theaters.

The box office is becoming a scary place these days. And for the first time in a long time, it’s scary in a good way. Just a week after A Quiet Place Part II lured the horror faithful back into darkened multiplexes, the latest chapter in the hit husband-and-wife demonologist saga, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, scared its way to a No. 1 opening in North America with a stronger-than-anticipated $24 million debut weekend.

Memorial Day weekend gave us proof that audiences are ready to return to the cinemas, as long as there is strong enough content to draw them in. With an overall weekend haul of $80.6 million, over 85% of which came from A Quiet Place Part II and Cruella, the domestic box office saw its best weekend since March 2020. While a repeat of the holiday weekend’s numbers is unlikely, AQP2 will battle it out with this week’s major newcomer, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, to lead another weekend that shows the business continues on its road to recovery.

Hollywood is finally back in business…and not a moment too soon. After 14 long months of darkened marquees and skittish moviegoers who opted to stay home and stream due to COVID-19, Memorial Day weekend arrived just in the nick of time.

After spending most of May dipping its toes in the water with medium-budget films, Hollywood is finally putting some heavyweights into the ring as Cruella and A Quiet Place Part II have their long-awaited debuts this Memorial Day weekend. At last, the summer blockbuster season is here. If audiences flock to these two newcomers as hoped, we should see the biggest weekend at the domestic box office since March 2020. It should also become the pandemic weekend champion, beating out April 23-25, 2021, which had a total gross of $57 million, with Mortal Kombat and Demon Slayer: Mugen Train leading the pack.

Despite the scorn of critics and its modest, penny-pinching budgets, the Saw franchise has always been one of Hollywood’s stealthiest and most surprising success stories. And now, thanks to Spiral’s roughly $4.6 million sophomore frame, which was good enough to hold the top spot in North America, the series just surpassed the $1 billion mark in total global ticket sales. Still, the biggest box-office story of the weekend came from overseas, where Universal’s latest Fast and the Furious sequel, F9, raked $162 million in its fuel-injected bow, with the lion’s share of loot coming from China.

The summer movie season will finally get some gas in its tank next weekend with the release of Cruella and A Quiet Place Part II, but this weekend the domestic box office will mostly be spinning its wheels. With no new wide releases, the titles in the top ten on the box office chart could look a lot like last week’s, perhaps with a few of the new limited releases sprinkled in. We’re likely headed into the lowest grossing weekend in months, which is unusual for the latter half of May, especially when you factor in the pandemic’s waning presence.

Even as the past year has served up more than its share of real-life terrors, it turns out that die-hard horror fans can still be counted on to turn out for the latest cinematic fright-fest—even if there’s an A-list movie star appearing in the theater next door. Exhibit A: Spiral, the newest chapter in the long-running Saw franchise, bowed at No. 1 at the North American box office over the weekend with an $8.7 million haul, trouncing the high-profile debut of Angelina Jolie’s survival thriller Those Who Wish Me Dead. While Spiral does feature a couple of bold-faced names of its own (namely, Chris Rock and Samuel L. Jackson), it’s always been the blood-soaked brand itself that’s been the big draw. Even squeamish critics, who gave the film a 39% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes, couldn’t convince gore-hounds to stay away.

The summer movie season continues on its road to recovery and normalcy, with four new wide releases hitting screens. Still, studios are holding back their big guns for now, as roughly one-third of theaters remain closed and capacity restrictions remain in place at many locations. The past few months have shown promising box office results from films such as Godzilla vs. Kong, Mortal Kombat, and Demon Slayer: Mugen Train, but it may still take some time before the box office returns to its former glory, with the major test coming over Memorial Day weekend when Cruella and A Quiet Place Part II face off.

On a weekend when all of the box-office prognosticators were primed to talk about how Marvel had done it again with Black Widow, those talking points were thrown out the window when the studio decided to push the Scarlett Johansson tentpole from May 7 to July 9. Fortunately, the weekend found another action hero waiting in the wings ready to save the day—Jason Statham, whose latest bareknuckle action-thriller, United Artists’ Wrath of Man, opened at No. 1 in North America with an $8.1 million bow.

At the end of the day, box-office success isn’t measured solely by opening-weekend numbers. Sometimes it’s a marathon, not a sprint. As proof, you need look no further than the newly reversed fortunes of Mortal Kombat and Demon Slayer: Mugen Train.

Just a month after Godzilla vs. Kong kicked off a much-needed rebound at the box office, two brawny newcomers KO’d the competition with a ferocious one-two punch, easily taking the top two spots in North America this weekend. The double-barreled debuts resulted in the biggest overall theatrical session since the coronavirus pandemic began a little more than a year ago and are just the latest sign that audiences might finally be ready to return to multiplexes after a year of streaming movies at home.

With little in the way of supersized cinematic foes to battle at the box office, Warner Bros.’ big-budget clash of the titans, Godzilla vs. Kong, kept stomping the competition this weekend, three-peating as the No. 1 film in North America, adding another $7.7 million to its already-impressive haul in its third frame.

While it didn’t roar quite as loudly as it did in its debut weekend, Warner Bros.’ big-budget clash of the titans, Godzilla vs. Kong, continued to rule the box office in its sophomore frame, adding $13.4 million at the domestic box office. And thanks to its monster-sized overseas haul, the titanic tentpole also managed to stomp past Christopher Nolan’sTenet to become the new top-grossing film of the pandemic era.

After a long year of gloom and doom at the box office, the Easter holiday weekend finally offered a giant ray of hope for movie theaters thanks to two of cinema’s most iconic characters. Godzilla vs. Kong, Warner Bros.’ big-budget kaiju grudge match, smashed pandemic-era records left and right in North America: The PG-13 extravaganza opened in the largest number of theaters since the COVID-19 outbreak (3,064); it had the largest opening day during that period ($9.6 million on Wednesday); it had the highest single-day gross ($12.5 million on Saturday); and it had the biggest three-day and five-day opening weekends ($32.2 million and $48.5 million respectively). In other words, it was just the kind of monster weekend that Hollywood’s been waiting for.